Today is the anniversary of the day on which the first robot was ever arrested. The event occurred on August 18, 1982 when a robot called DC-2 was taken into custody by the Beverly Hills Police Department. Its crime was illegally distributing business cards on North Beverly Drive.

Researchers have created a hitchhiking robot named hitchBOT that will be making its way across Canada this summer. If all goes well (and no one steals or destroys the thing) it will make its way from Halifax to Victoria. When people pick it up, it'll make "regionally relevant conversation using a combination of GPS and Wikipedia."

When Patrick Rizzo built his "walking and dancing" robot back in 1948, he said it was the only robot in the world able to perform such feats without wires and cables trailing behind it. It could walk unaccompanied into a room and then dance a jig. He valued it at $100,000. [Telegraph-Herald - Oct 22 1948]